Supply Chain Recovery

David Simchi-Levi has been a contributor to supply chain management for more than 20 years and I have two of the books he co-authored on my shelf, Designing and Managing the Supply Chain, a textbook for business and industrial engineering students, and The Logic of Logistics, for readers who care about the math behind the formulas and algorithms. So, when he announced a webinar on supply chain recovery after a pandemic, I signed up to listen. The full webinar is now available on Youtube, including a couple of minutes of dead silence in the middle while he was reading audience questions. The slide set is also available in PDF, and it includes an appendix with descriptions of algorithms not discussed in the webinar.

Michel Baudin‘s comments: As the COVID-19 pandemic is a currently unfolding catastrophe, the webinar devotes a large opening section to admiring the problem. This section is as of April 8, 2020. If the webinar were held, say, in August, 2020, this section would require an update. Simchi-Levi then goes on to describe a Risk Exposure Model that he and his team co-developed with Ford in the early 2010s based on the experience of supply chain recovery after the Fukushima earthquake or the Thailand floods of 2011. It is less connected to the latest news than the introduction.

These events disrupted, in particular, the supply of black paint to Ford, so that its customers could buy a car in any color as long as it was not black. They were major disasters at the time but, in retrospect, look small when compared with COVID-19. Simchi-Levi then uses the Risk Exposure Model as the basis for a series of recommendations to manufacturers.